Thursday, July 05, 2007

Why it matters

16 comments:

VtBudFan
said...

Thanks for posting this. It is hard to have hope sometimes, isn't it?

And sometimes I think that in 20 years my kids will be saying to me, "Why did you let it happen? Why didn't you DO something?" ...and I will have to tell them we were mowing the lawn, doing the laundry, carpooling to school, and playing catch while it was all happening.

Steve, I have to admit that I remain an unabashed fan of Bill Clinton despite his four billion eleventh-hour pardons, which though legal and well within his purview, I find morally suspect. The difference I see here, though, which Olbermann expresses far better than I can, is that by all appearances (based on the way that this has played out) Libby broke the law at the behest of the administration (the Vice President if not the President himself) with the up-front assurance that he would never be held fully accountable.

Thanks for posting this. I don't know what's harder to believe—the fact that it happened, or the fact that many of us are so jaded and disenfranchised (is this the word I want?) that we just shrug our shoulders and go on with our lives.

And we thought Nixon was corrupt. Bush, Cheney, Rove, Libby make Clinton look like a saint. Congress and the Administration are the "good ol' boys" club, and they will protect each other and do each other favors, day after day, in spite of this country, and it will always be that way, unfortunately. It runs far deeper than Presidential pardons. The Democrats "gave up" by not getting the troops out of Iraq. This is the worst I've seen it here. I don't think I will vote anymore for the President or for any Senators. I give up on our wonderful system. I will now only vote for people and issues that affect me locally.

I reread All the President's Men last summer. It shocked me (again) to know how corrupt and desperate the Nixon administration was. I'm disappointed (read: shocked to the core) at the lack of accountability in our current leadership.

To me, this is nothing but a small blip. He has already chosen to simply ignore, rather than veto, laws that have been enacted by congress and signed by the President. He has already suspended the writ of habeas corpus. He has subjected ordinary Americans to illegal search and seizure, and circumvented even the special secret mechanism set up for him to do so. He has told regulatory agencies not to enforce the regulations that they have on the books, because he doesn't like them - not in the "resetting of priorities" sense that all administrations engage in, but in the sense of a wholesale end to enforcement of huge swaths of the law. MOre than any before him, he has politicized the rank and file of the prosecutorial ranks to ensure that -- not only just what HE doesn't like is prosecuted, but also that Judges are babysat through a program he set up at the DOJ to keep track of them stepping "out of line" out there in the rest of the country.

Somehow, he fails to understand that the rule of law is undermined and cannot be regained. I think Scooter is at best a stupid footnote. He's more about the lies than about the extraordinary damage that has been done to this democracy at absolutely all levels. It is just a small example of his utter disregard for our form of government, but more importantly, for the rule by law and not by men upon which it relies and without which we are no more than some nations we could name where no one feels safe and justice never stops to take root.

That he has not been impeached is but the last nail in the coffin. If not for this, then for what? If not these two, then whom?

I echo all the comments, especially vtbudfan. I have no justification in what we've allowed to happen, other than falling prey to that all-purpose collective amnesia this administration has so effectively wrought. You almost think there's something in the water.

And the corruption continues... (this was in today's news) I also read that the 2 to 1 decision was 2 Republican judges vs 1 Democrat judge... http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/07/06/court.domestic.spying/index.html

It was actually somewhat healing for me to watch this clip. I've been so angry, for so long, that to hear a public figure deliver a six-minute scathing indictment of the Administration made me feel good. He put many of the things I would like to say into words more elegant than I could write myself.